This spring, via Congressional testimony, the country learned that many college and university presidents have become strikingly inarticulate when faced with a situation that they don’t control. I have a sneaking suspicion this applies to more than university presidents and to more situations than Congressional hearings. I think leaders of many kinds of organizations have been trained to control all communications and to avoid situations where they might say something unplanned or unexpected. Unless they’re Elon Musk. Which might be one of the best examples of an excluded middle that I can think of. You give up a lot of goodwill and leverage when you only talk to people from behind a shield of prepared communications and controlled settings.
We’ve also learned that senior leadership in higher education is unfamiliar with negotiation. Even more than avoiding spontaneous or extemporaneous communication, that is not their fault. I think a fair amount of that unfamiliarity is that they are beholden to trustees who not only don’t know how to negotiate, but just don’t believe in negotiation, who have two settings on their dials: situations I control and dictate outcomes, and situations I avoid where that is not possible. Compromise is for the little people.
My dad was a labor lawyer who represented management back in the days when the union movement was relatively strong. He was sad to see unions dwindle: he much preferred negotiating with unions over litigating wrongful termination suits brought by individuals in non-union workplaces. Sure, every union contract came with a certain amount of performative confrontation, with some ritual attempts at counting coup. I remember one time that a Teamsters local got into his office and threw papers everywhere, just to do a little muscle flex. Not a problem.
Those negotiations were mostly about trying to find a good spot for everybody inside a range of known outcomes. There were information asymmetries that created extra imbalances but they were relatively minor: generally both parties knew a fair amount about the financials on both sides, about the industry as a whole, and about new issues that had to be dealt with. (Say, training people on new machinery, dealing with new kinds of workplace hazards due to changes in workflow, working out new grievance procedures, and so on.)
That changed when Reagan came into office and changed even more through Bill Clinton’s two terms. A whole host of changes swept through government policy that made unionization harder and encouraged companies to disregard the previous range of outcomes and go for broke, to believe they had nothing to negotiate. This always made me think of a videotape my dad made for his clients (and prospective clients) about how to cope with unionization drives. His first piece of advice at the beginning of the tape, repeated at the end, was “If you don’t want a union, act like you have one. If you act as if the lack of a union means you can treat your workers badly, you’ll end up with a union, and a highly adversarial union at that.”
I think there’s a deeper wisdom in there about negotiation. To enter into negotiations of any kind means you’ve already acknowledged that you either cannot or should not dictate terms unilaterally to whomever you’re negotiation with. That they have something you want, that they can do something to you that is materially important which you would rather avoid. The moment you start negotiations is the moment that you have acknowledged limits to your power. Those limits don’t have to be just about the power that your negotiating partners hold, either. They might be self-imposed limits that you place on yourself because of your values or mission, a recognition that there are actions you can’t take without destroying your own assets or inflicting harm to yourself.
One of the reasons I subscribed to Adam Mastroianni’s excellent Substack was to have access to his three-part series on negotiation. The first part says, more or less, “figure out your best alternative to a negotiated agreement”. E.g., what happens if your negotiations fail?
In the second part, he says, basically: figure out whether you’re dealing with a distributive issue, an integrative issue, or a compatible issue. The first is zero-sum where both parties want the same thing and only one can have it, the second is where one party wants something a lot and the other party doesn’t care nearly as much (but cares a little) and the third is where both parties more or less want the same thing and just need the negotiations to reveal that to them. (In this case, Mastroianni notes, the worst move is to accept an offer to move from an integrative issue where you have advantage to a distributive one where you don’t.)
In the third part, which I liked best, he counsels people to not confuse a position with an interest when entering into a negotiation, and in fact, to not take a position at all. As he points out, positions can only be satisfied in one way, whereas interests can be satisfied in many ways. Interests are negotiable, positions are not. If you declare a position before entering a negotiation, you’re not really negotiating. If both parties are looking to their interests, they can discover compatible issues that were obscured before, and trade integrative positions (e.g., find a thing that each party wants very badly and the other party doesn’t want very much).
What Mastroianni ends on is this wisdom: negotiation is a good thing that “merely requires the belief that you can get better deals than the ones life gives you by default, and a few ideas about how to do that.”
Going back to my dad’s point, you could argue that the best move of all is to always pre-emptively seek compatible issues by default, essentially to know what the other parties you’re dealing with want and to understand what your own wants are and keep that aligned in a sustained way. This might be the first reason that negotiation has come upon higher education in a way that reveals a lack of familiarity with the basics of the art, that for many years in many institutions it wasn’t especially necessary, because most interests between administrations, faculty and students were compatible.
Some of the loss of that compatibility was a result of externally-imposed changes. In public universities, the withdrawal of government funding led to increased tuition, which opened up a distributive gap between students and universities (without government paying a price for that, because for some reason students and their families didn’t blame government despite government being responsible). That in turn led administrations to look to control costs via pressure on faculty compensation.
In other cases, I think administrations moved into a position that strengthened over time, a position that they needed to be in charge more and the faculty in charge less. I’ve mentioned the book Locus of Authority before, which I honestly believe has either been read in some kind of presidents-and-trustees book club or has been circulated as a summary. Locus of Authority is basically a book-length argument about and against faculty governance that winds itself up to strenuously recommend that faculty be pushed back into a small domain of matters that genuinely concern them, and even then to be told that they may have to accept unilateral dictates from trustees and leadership. It’s not a particularly compelling read, but the oddest thing about it is that the reason for this advice is pretty threadbare. Much of it boils down to “for the sake of efficient centralized decision-making in a changing world where decisions might have to be more efficient.” Which in Mastroianni’s terms might be a case of stating a position that takes everyday operations that were mostly structured around compatibility and converts them to distributive battles over what is seen as a zero-sum store of power.
Because that move wasn’t stated in terms of interests, it has been easy for faculty to suspect (in many cases, then had the suspicion demonstrated) that the interest behind the position is to make it easier to fire professionals with good contracts and replace them with professionals with bad contracts. But even there this is more of a position (“control costs”) than an interest in the sense that even extremely wealthy institutions with a lot of room to maneuver financially have taken “control costs” as an imperative—and yet applied the imperative unevenly in the sense that they are often far less driven to control costs in administrative salaries and elsewhere. But even here you could see a way that stating “control costs” as an interest could lead to something like a productive negotiation. If you open the books to everybody and show that a failure to control costs will lead to the closure of the institution in the near-term, you’ve got a negotiation where both parties can find a compatibility, since neither party wants that.
If instead the position is something like, “update the curriculum, make it attractive to students, fill the skills gap in the labor market”, again, what’s the interest underlying that? Generally I suspect that most administrations insisting on unilaterally dictating that position don’t want to open the books, as it were, because usually there are no books. E.g., many colleges and universities can’t negotiate on curricular change because the administrations have no evidence that the changes they want will in fact save the institution by making it more viable. Their interest in these cases is “keep the trustees or president from firing me”, and in turn, the trustees want those changes because they have an a priori ideological belief in those propositions. A position, once again. Their interest lies in spreading that ideology whether or not it improves financial sustainability. At which point again, there ought to be something negotiable other than “take over the curriculum, kick the faculty out of controlling it”—the ideology can be satisfied just with a new business program or a new institute. That these changes are rarely negotiated in this deep way is a sign of yet another ideology beyond it, which is a kind of maximalist view of authority where any real negotiation is viewed as a failure.
If you want another example of why negotiation is unfamiliar and difficult, you can see it in the numerous cases of universities and colleges that called cops rather than negotiate, or negotiated and failed when facing student activists. I’m not saying that this year’s crop of student activists would do very well in terms of Mastroianni’s advice either, in that many of them were clearly negotiating from positions rather than interests and had little or no sense of what compatibilities or integrations were available to them. They’re young and they’re students: in a good negotiation, perhaps another feature is that you teach the other party about how to go about it.
Among other things, I actually think some of the administrators in these negotiations could say frankly, “My interest here is in not getting fired, and your interest ought to be compatible with that, since you really don’t want the people who will be appointed instead of me.” But I also think many of the harder-line administrations and their trustee backers weren’t really thinking through Mastroianni’s “alternative to a negotiated agreement” in terms of how bad it turned out and will continue to be—what it means to have cops on campus, to have half or more of the students angry at graduation, to deepen an adversarial relationship with some of the best or most charismatic students, to have to lawyer up even more, to seek yet more authority, and in the end, likely magnify and intensify the protests despite all that. I’m not wild about thinking of students as customers but in some sense that is what they are. A service provider who goes to war against customers isn’t thinking very clearly. An educator who goes to war against students is even more messed up.
These are issues that I write about a lot, so I’m always looking for a new angle on the problem, and whether there are better ways to get through our present moment intact. Negotiation worked pretty well back when leaders and groups were used to engaging in it and saw compatibilities readily. Chasing maximalist authority without limits doesn’t seem to be working out very well for anybody except people who have so much power that they can’t imagine having to share it. And I’m not sure even they are resting easily these days.
Back when I was on the management side of a university bargaining table, I *liked* that labour, including faculty, were unionised: a collective bargaining agreement helps an awful lot when problems arise, especially when there is a member of staff causing a lot of strife. It also gave me a way of keeping lines of communication open - what I see as the greatest problem of contemporary university senior management is their detachment from people in different posts who have a good position from which to view what is going on.
I’ve made a point of having my students take a look at this oldie: https://www.nber.org/papers/w0364